Arts Plus. Theater.

Production Lacks Luster, But `Glass Menagerie' Still Essential

February 10, 1995|By Lawrence Bommer, Special to the Tribune.

Fifty years after Claudia Cassidy welcomed it into the world in these pages, Tennessee Williams' semi-autobiographical masterpiece, "The Glass Menagerie," has become an essential play, its story strong enough to define everyone who sees it.

Williams' exposure of the false values of a Depression family is matched in fury only by the eloquent compassion he offers these wounded Wingfields. The most wounded is mother Amanda: She desperately plans to recoup her life's losses by helping organize her daughter Laura's rendezvous with a stranger, yet Amanda secretly wants Laura to fail, so that Laura can never leave her, as her husband did.

The play is one long, searing memory, recalled in bitter helplessness by a haunted brother, the author's surrogate. Yet the fact that the action takes place in the past doesn't mean it can't hold us as we watch it. Few keepsakes detonate like Williams' bittersweet family album.

Sadly, the play, a 50th-anniversary revival by the newly founded Tess Productions, never comes to life in the present.

Tom Tenney's well-meant staging founders on a lack of energy, a perverse penchant for unprofound pauses and an inability to build scenes until they break. This lassitude takes the edge off every conflict and blunts the humor.

Nothing about "The Glass Menagerie" should seem casual. But this glacial version milks emotions it never bothers to establish and imposes a sickly fragility on the Wingfields that belies Williams' often acidic humor.

Stephen Rader fares best as the wandering son Tom, his dry disillusionment as the narrator contrasted with the son's fury at being nagged into nightly escapes into Hollywood fantasies.

As if too shy to act, Terri McPhee gives daughter Laura an exasperating diffidence that never lifts; she goes into her shell so deeply that we don't care if she ever emerges. Initially sympathetic as Laura's go-getter gentleman caller, Jeff Orr succumbs to McPhee's catatonia until their great scene turns funereal.

Bobbi Schultz's much-martyred mother Amanda conveys the matron's ridiculous airs and graces but none of the formidable frustrations that make her so hard on her children.

Len Aluise's contorted set design forces key scenes to be played upstage, where they lose all intimacy and impact.